a16z Just Launched a School

Gagan Biyani (0:00)

Instead of raising for 18 months, we raised for a few years. This was very intentional, because there's a big difference between starting a school and starting an AI app. But one of the simple reasons for raising $40 million, we'll have crypto founders, and we'll have robotics founders, and we'll have AI apps and classic SaaS, and we'll have different people coming in. And the promise that I think we can make is that you will learn how to be an AI native builder with super high agency, with the people skills to understand the culture of Silicon Valley. And if we can accomplish those three things, I believe this will be the most valuable educational experience that anyone could ever have.

Molly O'Shea (0:35)

You have all these amazing partners like Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, Stripe, and so many more. These students will have direct access to what it takes to build a company. Have you thought about buying Alcatraz. Gagan Biyani, welcome to Sourcery.

Gagan Biyani (1:03)

Thanks for having me, Molly.

Molly O'Shea (1:05)

Well, we're here at the A16Z office. We were talking beforehand how.

Horowitz Andreessen Academy is the reverse order of that. So congratulations on the big announcement. What happened?

Gagan Biyani (1:18)

Well, today we are announcing the launch of Horowitz Andreessen Academy. It's a new post high school program residential in San Francisco for young builders who want to get jobs or start companies in the technology space.

And personally, I just think it's like kind of a dream. I think it's a dream for the students because it's a completely new take on what you could do post college or post high school in the AI era. I think it's a huge opportunity for the world because we're going to design a new type of institution that is going to show a positive and optimistic frame on what college could look like if it adopted some of the principles of an AI native education.

Molly O'Shea (2:10)

So how is it structurally different?

Gagan Biyani (2:12)

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of differences between what the school will offer and what a typical college will. I'll give you a couple of examples. First of all, it's completely unaccredited. So we don't have to follow the same accreditation rules of a typical college. We do have to get regulatory approval before we launch our paid programs, but it's very different. So the differences are first, this program is highly experiential. So instead of focusing all of your time around class and the sort of top-down structure of the university is fundamentally how many credits you take per semester. This is a project-based experience because in the AI era, you can learn whatever you need to learn on the job. Therefore, it's much more effective for students to go and just build things. And so they'll get to do projects that they desire. And I have three different categories of projects. I think they'll have research projects, learning projects, and building projects or entrepreneurial projects. And so, you can imagine a research project where someone is trying to learn everything they can about the restaurant industry, or about robotics, or about hard manufacturing.

They'll go and literally travel to the big manufacturing facilities around the country or maybe even in the world. And they will deeply try to understand how it works, while simultaneously, you know, maybe studying robotics, the technical side of robotics, you know, via both self-driven learning, but also via online courseware or courses that we offer at the Academy.

And then, you can also imagine that they then decide, hey, I want to go and try and build like a new type of robotic vacuum, or I want to play with the new hugging face duck, right? And so, you can imagine a world in which this student is visiting factories in Shenzhen or maybe they're visiting factories in Austin or LA.

And simultaneously, they are studying online, you know, and through our sort of diverse network of faculty robotics. And they're also building an actual robot from scratch. And this is the type of experience that we want to create for the student who comes to Horowitz Andreessen Academy.

Molly O'Shea (4:44)

So how does your career in education, building companies, result to partnering with Mark and Eric on this?

Gagan Biyani (4:53)

Yeah, I mean, I think this is just a big part of my life's work is to rebuild the education system for the future. You know, when I start my first company, I was 13 years old.

I didn't even know it was a company. Technically, it wasn't actually.

Molly O'Shea (5:13)

Was it legal?

Gagan Biyani (5:14)